In search of answers on France’s year of terror

PARIS — More than a year after the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Paris kosher supermarket, the victims’ relatives are still demanding answers on whether or how France’s government and security forces failed.

Now, after the even deadlier November assaults in Paris, the French have reasons to fear that they will never know what went wrong, and that lessons won’t be drawn from the debacle.

“If the relatives of the January victims are still left in the dark,” said François Heisbourg, the chairman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, “imagine what it will be multiplied by 20 with the Bataclan’s and other November victims, if the government keeps refusing to answer the questions.”

Heisbourg, a former aide to France’s Socialist governments, is leading a campaign to create a special investigative commission on last year’s terror attacks. It would aim to be similar to the U.S. government’s probe of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which involved more than 1,200 interviews and resulted in a 585-page report that guided policymakers for years.

He’s backed up by people such as Ingrid Brinsolaro, the widow of the policeman assigned to the security detail of a Charlie Hebdo editor. Frustrated by the lack of response to her queries, she filed a lawsuit after a year of seeking “the truth” about the death of her husband, and about the security failings that may have made it possible.

But proponents of a comprehensive review face an uphill struggle in a country where the police and intelligence services traditionally attract little scrutiny from the media or parliament, and where the government gets to decide what parliament should investigate — or not.

Heisbourg’s proposal has been ignored by the Socialist government and met mostly with deafening silence by politicians from all parties.

Tearing the national fabric

The left fears that the proposed commission’s findings could embarrass the government if they show it has been inept at tackling the terrorist threat since President François Hollande’s election in 2012. The right worries that the commission could throw light on an ill-fated reform of the security services under then-president Nicolas Sarkozy.

“I’m not sure it would be a good idea to have such a commission right now,” said one former government adviser, summing up the French elites’ dominant view. “I can see it as a powerful way to tear the national fabric in a delicate time.”

“We must throw light on what happened and how the crisis was managed after the attacks occurred” — François Heisbourg

Heisbourg has a different view. Politicians “should realize that they could only reassure public opinion if it is confident that all will be done to draw the lessons from the 2015 attacks,” he said. “Everyone keeps repeating that other attacks will occur, which is likely. People living under a state of emergency need to know what is being done to make their uncomfortable situation less unbearable.”

The commission’s goals would be two-fold, Heisbourg said.

“First we need to understand the 2015 attacks and why we weren’t able to thwart them,” he said. “Second, we must throw light on what happened and how the crisis was managed after the attacks occurred.”

Maryse Wolinski, a writer and the widow of celebrated cartoonist Wolinski, has just published a book, “Chérie je vais à Charlie” (“Honey, I’m off to ‘Charlie'”), the last sentence her husband told her on the day of the killings. She recently said in a radio interview that her “anger redoubled” after the November 13 attacks.

Some conservative politicians, such as Sarkozy, Bruno Le Maire, a former cabinet minister who is running for his party’s nomination, and Jean-Christophe Lagarde, the leader of a small centrist party, have already asked for a parliamentary investigative commission on last year’s attacks.

But they probably know it would be near-impossible under the French legal system, in which Parliament cannot investigate on facts that are the matter of a lawsuit.

On the other side of the aisle, Elisabeth Guigou, the chair of the National Assembly (lower house) Foreign Affairs Committee and a former justice minister, told POLITICO that parliament might want to know more on the “police wars” — the rivalries between different law enforcement services — that could partly explain the failings that came to light last year.

In any case, she added, “parliament has all the powers it needs to throw light on what happened, in order to draw lessons from the attacks.”

The question is whether lawmakers will choose to use those powers as the presidential campaign is gearing up.

Difficult questions

Heisbourg believes a broader, ad hoc commission is needed. “It must be tasked with going deeply into the roots of the problem,” he said, suggesting that only half its members should be parliamentarians — the other half being appointed by the executive branch. “It needs to have broad powers, on the model of the U.S. 9/11 commission, and should do some thorough scrubbing just like the U.S. commission did.”

Brinsolaro’s husband was assigned to the security detail of Stéphane Charbonnier, aka Charb, the Charlie Hebdo editor killed along with 10 other journalists on January 7, 2015, by two brothers who said they wanted to punish the satirical paper for its caricatures of prophet Muhammad

She wants to know why her husband’s security detail was reduced to two people even though the threat to Charlie Hebdo and its journalists hadn’t receded, and why a security barrier deemed necessary was not built because it was thought to be too expensive.

Heisbourg noted that the policemen who were dispatched to the Charlie Hebdo building minutes after shots were fired didn’t even know the paper was in their district, even though “along with the Eiffel Tower and the Arch of Triumph, this may have been in the top three potential targets in Paris.”

“If this is not done, can you imagine the uproar whenever the next attacks occur?” — Stephane Peu, deputy mayor

Questions also abound about the November 13 attacks, and the time it took police and emergency services to arrive after the first shots at the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 died.

While the Socialist government faces tough questions on what it did exactly between January and November to improve intelligence on terrorist networks and end the dysfunctional rivalries between security services, the conservatives might have to explain why they dismantled the domestic intelligence service that used to have deep roots in urban communities.

Stephane Peu, the communist deputy mayor of Saint-Denis — the suburb north of Paris where some of the terror attacks suspects died during a police raid on November 18 — recently pointed out that about 20 officers of the service were stationed in his city before the 2008 reform and they have now been reassigned.

Only a commission can credibly point out what went wrong and reassure the public that steps will be taken to avoid a repeat, Heisbourg insists. “If this is not done, can you imagine the uproar whenever the next attacks occur?”

Thirty years ago, the French government and technocratic elites tried to reassure the population about the possible impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident — and the risks of the nuclear industry in general — with elaborate lies trying to show the nuclear cloud had somehow skipped France.

“It has become both a joke and a source of deep mistrust in the government’s ability to tell the truth in times of crisis,” said Heisbourg. “Even people who weren’t born then now know about the infamous ‘Chernobyl cloud.’”

The result of that episode, he said, is that if a serious nuclear accident ever happens in France, no one will believe anything the government says. The same will happen, he warned, if the French are kept in the dark about what went wrong in 2015.

The French should not commit the same mistake which was committed by India after Mumbai 26/11. A thorough inquiry and a possible overhaul of security agencies will enable the French to thwart at least 60% to 65% of the terror strikes in future.

Posted on 1/19/16 | 9:20 AM CET

Veritas-Semper

I can see why everyone in France is loath to do some soul searching. They must have all come face to face with the sheer enormity of the proposed project.

After all: how does one investigate months, years, centuries starting from the “events” of 1789?

It’s tough to look in the mirror, isn’t it, France?

Posted on 1/19/16 | 11:00 AM CET

paleocon666

The root of the evil is the mass immigration of millions of hostile elements into France (and Europe). And the elite is fully responsible for that.